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Friday, January 29, 2010

Watching Jay Leno interviewed by Oprah, he cut a more sympathetic figure — people often do, even or especially when interrogated, which the Queen of talk did not. But Winfrey asked nearly all the right questions and got Leno to the precipice a couple of times, making the contours of the recent late night skirmish clearer and perhaps also, despite himself, his own motives.

Leno has enjoyed unique success but laudably remains a blue-collar guy, a lot like the younger one who left Massachusetts in a beat-up car, listening to James Taylor and wondering if anyone would hear from him again. And he probably really is the hardest working man in show business, spending something like 200 days on the road doing stand-up and revealing to Oprah that he lives on what he makes without his NBC salary — an astonishing fact given his expensive car hobby, to say the least.

In my psychobabble view I liken Leno to Regis Philbin, a genuine child of the Great Depression who has to work, always work, always save, because you never know when you will lose it all, just like that (after that the similarities pretty much end; years ago in a conversation on the air it became painfully apparent that Regis had no idea even that he drove Jaguar.)

So here is the problem: Leno accurately (in my view) said this mess was driven by interests of the affiliates, whom he has always studiously courted, and acknowledged that NBC itself was making money on his show by dramatically cutting costs for the 10 pm period (scripted episodes, Leno said, cost $3-$6 million per). The affiliates, though, were losing money because he was losing his time slot big time, and in TV Land affiliates are like real shareholders who can and should have significant say about network programming.

Leno also said that The Tonight Show's ratings were down about 50%, and that it was losing money for the first time in its 60-year franchise, and that this fact largely escaped press scrutiny probably because the better story was him, the future of television, cratering at 10.

So, the first circle I can't square is the apparent fact that, even though The Tonight Show was a bigger relative ratings bomb, it was the failure of The Jay Leno Show which got this snowball rolling, something Leno indirectly acknowledges with answers here and there is the case but doesn't accept square on, by returning again and again to the fact that Conan O'Brien wasn't doing well, and worse than him.

But by Leno's own account it wasn't a desire to do something about O'Brien, as poorly as he was doing in his first seven months against the well-established David Letterman. Indeed, the NBC master plan assumed O'Brien would stay — NBC was not engineering his ouster. They wanted to keep him. What they didn't want was Jay at 10 anymore, lowering the tide for The Tonight Show as much as it was for the affiliate 11 pm news shows.

Trying to keep O'Brien may have been based primarily on a desire to save a large severance rather than a gut feeling that he would become a good earner. But they tried to keep him — and Leno, per Leno, in a sort of cruel poetic justice of the same dynamic which caused the network to lose Letterman in 1982 as they tried to keep both late night hosts and picked Leno for "Tonight."

But still, NBC approached Leno first, and not with a plan to outright replace an O'Brien the network assumed would play ball. O'Brien's departure was not a fait accompli, or even contemplated. Leno could have walked, accepting the consequences of breaking his contract it sounds like NBC was on solid ground not to re-negotiate much, given the very public direness of the 10 pm situation, and become a sympathetic one-man Grateful Dead working the crowds he loves forever.

My other problem is that, in the end, it seems that Leno and O'Brien were both presented with the exact same choice and decided in the exact opposite way. This is telling: O'Brien didn't want to be moved (and The Tonight Show to change it's start time for the first time in its 60-year history) but was determined to protect the financial interests of his staff, for whom he negotiated something like $12 million in severances.

This is probably enough for some to retire and for the others to hang on while finding something else in the business, or to re-invent themselves. As a person who was once given a generous buyout to leave my job, I can say that there is nothing ultimately more liberating than this — as great as it is not to have to worry about not having a job.

But, oh yeah, you always worry about that. In TV perhaps more than in any other business. In fact, I have always had a nagging sense of guilt about engineering a continuing situation for one person on my former staff instead of perhaps forcing the company to make him an offer of a buyout or a job. By doing so I gave myself and the company — and not him — the power.

So largess and concern can have unintended consequences or can, I now suspect about Leno, mask one's true motives. Leno was concerned about the fortunes of his staff, he told Oprah, and decided on their behalves that the right thing to do would be to ensure the continuity of their employment by ensuring his own.

It may be that concern for his staff (they are not his employees, because he does not own the show) was his over-riding consideration. He did pay them out of his pocket during the writer's strike, and pretty much devoted his last Tonight Show (well, so far) to what seemed like a family picnic. Anyway I believe he believes it, to paraphrase Leno when he playfully suggested to Oprah that she had no more intention of fading away with her announced retirement next year than he had now to take take this opportunity to leave the stage.

But, after this interview, I am not so sure. Leno is a decent guy, but flawed in a way the younger and less experienced but perhaps more confident O'Brien is not. Even though Leno initially asked to be let out of his contract when he told his 10 pm show would be canceled, any resolve to walk away, and then shame NBC to do right by his people as O'Brien did, disappeared.

Thursday, January 21, 2010

It's rare for someone in the moral cesspool that is often public life to be as utterly shameless as John Edwards, so I feel compelled to write a few things down to keep track of it all.

Let's see:

You have an adulterous affair with a woman, from the office, who is younger than your dying wife, whose incurable cancer is a matter of public record.

You apparently have unprotected sex with this woman. A child is born, and you deny paternity so she will read all about that in a few years.

You not only pointedly lie about all this but you convince or force other people step up to publicly support your lie.

You say you will take a paternity test you cannot be compelled to take and have no intention of taking because you know it will expose your lie, a litigator's trick that is slimy even by litigator standards.

All this is going on as you try to get elected president of the United States. Disclosure of your sins during the campaign or after your election would stigmatize your party in a way not seen since Richard Nixon made "Republican" a dirty word. You don't care about that, either.

When you finally come clean, under the back-breaking preponderance of evidence nobody but a birther could possibly construe any other way, you don't come clean yourself, but put another crony in front of the cameras to spill your guts. He refers to you as a liar, whooppee, while also saying how tough this has been on you.

You, meanwhile, while not spilling your guts, acting as if any of this is going on, or even appearing conflicted or contrite, blather on about Haiti, making your vanity now hemispheric as you use the death and hopelessness of millions of people a backdrop for your attempt to re-enter the human race.

You decide to put on this pathetic show in Haiti, where your presence on the ground will do nobody any good, and where I hope your televised remarks about how desperate things are there will be mashed up with your hair-coiffing embarrassment and displayed on the hacked version of a campaign site you haven't had the decency to update so it at least does not say:

"I began my presidential campaign here to remind the country that we, as citizens and as a government, have a moral responsibility to each other, and what we do together matters."

Howell, 68, worked for both Minneapolis newspapers, ran one of them as it won two Pulitzer Prizes, and then became the Washington bureau chief for the Newhouse Newspaper Group and editor of Newhouse News Service — where her staff also won a Pulitzer. (Newshouse News is owned by Advance Publications, which is also the parent company of Condé Nast Digital, my employer).

We never met, but I knew of Deborah Howell professionally; when she wrote an amusingly scathing piece about a WaPo opinion column which argued that women may actually be weaker and stupider than men because some of them had fainted at Obama campaign rallies, I wrote about it in a column for the Committee of Concerned Journalists.

Howell made it look easy:

Of course, it's important for provocative opinion to be in the paper, especially in Outlook, which is all commentary. And this should have nothing to do with politics. (Writer Charlotte) Allen is a conservative, and Outlook should pay attention to conservative opinion.

But my umpteen years of experience have taught me to be wary of using humor, satire or irony about gender, race or religion. Humor can easily go awry or be misunderstood; it deserves extra care in editing and labeling. The Allen piece was offensive because it was a broadside against all women, despite her weasel words here and there. And the piece had the fatal flaw of not being funny. At all.

Howell had the rare talent to be engaging and "readable" in what is often a clinical or adversarial position. I've always thought of a newspaper ombud as a Internal Affairs police officer: Nobody on the inside ever wants to hear from you, and nobody on the outside really appreciates what you do.

Ombuds are a dying breed at newspapers, which have very little ballast left to toss overboard anyway. But as the readers' advocate in what could otherwise be an echo chamber of self-adulation the position would seem to be an important differentiating factor as traditional media tries meets greater competition from upstart media which may or may not respect the same journalistic traditions.

Money Quotes

Favorite Quotes

"Any problem can be solved with the materials available in the room."— Edwin Land

"When working on a problem, I never think about beauty; I only think of how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know that it is wrong."— R. Buckminster Fuller

"The day soldiers stop bringing you their problems is the day you have stopped leading them. They have either lost confidence that you can help or concluded you do not care. Either case is a failure of leadership."— Colin Powell

"The odds are greatly against you being immensely smarter than everyone else in the field. If your analysis says your terminal velocity is twice the speed of light, you may have invented warp drive, but the chances are a lot better that you've screwed up."— Attributed to Dave Akin